First software family to run on the grid

First software family to run on the grid

Zatni Arbi , Columnist, Jakarta

zatni@cbn.net.id

Suppose you are throwing a party at your house to celebrate your
golden anniversary. You are going to invite all your relatives,
friends, colleagues, neighbors -- what have you.

You will rent a powerful sound system, put in dozens of high-
power spotlights, install a number of portable air conditioners
in the house, and order a number of electric stoves to prepare
food for hundreds of guests. Just imagine how much electricity
you'll need for just that one night?

How are you going to meet the need? Are you going to invest in
a multikilowatt generator just for one night of fun? If you are,
what are you going to do with it until you need it again --
perhaps when your daughter's wedding day arrives 10 years down
the road?

At least, as far as electricity goes, especially if you live
in countries where electricity is largely taken for granted, you
will have nothing to worry about. You just use the electricity as
you need, and the electrical grid will meet your demand.

The word "grid", at least in the U.S. recently, has been a
very familiar word. It became the word on everybody's lips on
Aug. 14, when suddenly New Yorkers and people in the neighboring
states found themselves without electricity.

The grid, in this case, referred to the interconnected systems
that supply electricity to subscribers. There are many different
sources of electricity made available on the grid. Some of the
electricity may be generated by turbine-based generators, some
may come from nuclear plants. And some may also be supplied by
generators driven by diesel motors. Some power plants use steam
to propel the generators, and others use coal.

A key aspect of the grid, needless to say, is the standards.
Here in Indonesia, we may not have stringent standards -- which
is why people in some places have stable currents while others
have to use voltage stabilizers to maintain the voltage as close
to the required 220 volts as possible. In the U.S., as well as
other developed countries, no stabilizer is generally necessary,
as the entire grid supplies the standard 110 or 220 volts.

Another key aspect of the grid is that it is supposed to be
able to supply all the electricity that we need at any given
time. So if you live in an apartment in San Francisco, you should
be able to use as much electricity as you like as long as you pay
for it. That has not always been the case, however, as the
California power crisis demonstrated.

Yet, those who live in San Francisco are better off than, for
example, the people who live in my neighborhood. Not only is our
voltage generally far below the standard 220 volts, we cannot
freely increase our electricity use for portable air conditioners
when we are having a large birthday party, for example, as the
power company PLN limits how much electricity we can use in our
individual households. Of course, the reason for imposing the
limits is to enable PLN to charge us a higher rate the more
electricity we need daily.

A power grid, nonetheless, makes it possible for power
companies to share resources. Anyone who needs electricity for
his electric shaver or welding machine will only need to plug his
device into the power outlet. He would not have to know where the
electricity comes from, who makes it available, etc.

Grid Computing

Using the power grid as a model, researchers came up with the
idea of grid computing. Instead of using one single, stand-alone
computer with immense computing power and an extremely high price
tag in isolation to run computer applications, why not connect a
large number of smaller and cheaper computers together to do the
same job?

It would be cheaper and it would use the computational cycles
of the computers that would otherwise remain idle during the time
they had anything to do. That is one of the basic ideas behind
the computational grid. The idea itself emerged in the early
1970s, when computers began to be connected together in networks
in several research centers in the U.S.

These researchers actually began building the computing grid
in the mid-1990s when all the necessary components for the
infrastructure became largely available -- Ethernet, Internet,
Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS), etc.
-- to tackle heavy-duty computational jobs.

One of the examples of this computational power grid is
Distributed.net. These grids have acquired various names,
including utility computing (obviously because they enable us to
use computing power much like we use electricity), on-demand
computing, 10g, the grid for business

For businesses, the benefits of a computing grid are numerous,
and they were highlighted by Larry Ellison, the chairman and CEO
of Oracle Corp., during his speech at the recent OracleWorld 2003
in San Francisco. During this event, the company officially
introduced its Oracle 10g, which is meant to run on an enterprise
grid.

"We use the term 'enterprise grid' to differentiate what we
mean from the grid used in the academic world," said Ellison at
the beginning of his speech.

In my next article, we will take a closer look at some of the
new features of the Oracle 10g family, which includes Oracle
Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g. We will also
explore the benefits of the grid to businesses, as promised by
this largely welcomed update of Oracle products.

One thing to note is that the Oracle 10g, which everyone at
the Redwood Shores-based company is so upbeat about, is the first
enterprise software built to run on a grid. It does not mean that
Oracle is the only company driving the use of computing grid into
the business world, however. IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems have
also been pushing the same idea.

However, for now, Oracle has beaten its competitors in the
database arena -- IBM and Microsoft -- by adding the grid
capability to its database product, making it more suitable to
companies with large distributed data centers and computers that
are idle much of the time, plus an urge to maximize the
efficiency of their investments.